What’s Going On

This has to be the fourth blog post in as many weeks that I have started to write. The others have been banished to the back of my mind with a little help from the delete key. Half-hearted attempts to be witty, insightful, or (heaven forbid) instructional have been relegated to the nether regions of my brain where, as is the fate of most of my thoughts, will be summarily forgotten never to be spoken of again. Which in all three cases is probably a good thing.

So instead of writing about some CSS tip that has been posted by others with more skill than myself, I will briefly mention a few things that I’ve been excited about recently.

My New MacBook Pro

Of course I was going to write about this. I have been wanting a Mac for quite some time and I can finally say that I am now a proud owner of one. It really is a wonderful machine and the software available is truly amazing. Two apps that I have been dying to use, TextMate and Coda, are simply incredible and I’ve been putting them to the test this past week. It makes developing websites so much easier and a hell of a lot of fun. I highly recommend both.

I have been bugging my Mac owning friends lately on which apps I need to install. I have received some great recommendations so far, although I haven’t had time to install or try out all of them yet. I plan to and will post a list of my favorites here at a later time.

CWSA and BarCamp

There’s probably enough I could write here to be a post on its own, but I will just touch briefly on the subject. I and many fellow members of the Cleveland Web Standards Association have been discussing the idea of organizing a conference on Web Standards in the Northeast Ohio region. Taking into consideration that our group is still relatively small with little in the way of resources (and following the sage advice of Eric Meyer), I have been reading up on how to organize a BarCamp for Cleveland.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with BarCamp, here is a short description from Wikipedia:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences, open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants, often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

It will take some time to get this organized but I am excited about the possibilities. A night of great talks, great people and ideas. I’m really looking forward to getting this underway. Cleveland needs events like this.

Coworking Space in Cleveland

Listening to the frustrations of a fellow web developer in the area has me thinking a lot about setting up a coworking space in Cleveland. Something along the lines of Citizen Space and Independents Hall. There are a lot of freelancers in the area, working in their home offices, basements and kitchens. While working at home does have some advantages there are always the inevitable distractions: television, children, spouses, chores, and so on. In addition to those distractions you lose the opportunity to collaborate and network face to face with your industry peers.

That being said I have begun to look into what is involved in setting something like this up in the Cleveland area. Mind you, I have absolutely no experience as to what it takes to get something like this established, but I believe it is something that could really benefit a lot of people in the region.

Well, there you have it. Just a few things that have my attention lately. BarCamp is definitely something that I can see happening in the next several months. The coworking idea, well, for now its a pipe-dream, but with a little effort and some help it could be a possibility. Who knows?